http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10324
Plamen Vassilev plamen.vassilev@gmail.com changed:
What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |plamen.vassilev@gmail.com
--- Comment #15 from Plamen Vassilev plamen.vassilev@gmail.com 2008-03-20 03:27:42 --- I think that the best way is for wine to simply print an error/warning and refuse to run as root unless told so by a command line switch (like --allow-root-user or something). Warning could be easily lost when running application which produces a lot of console output, and not seen at all if wine is started by a desktop link. Using command line switch implies that the user is both warned, and (hopefully) knows what they're doing. Thus (I think) we got best from the both worlds, wine is not accidentally started by root, and allowing to start wine as root if absolutely necessary. I imagine it could look like:
root@host:~#wine notepad ERROR: You are strongly discoraged to run wine as root user. (Some explanation may follow.) If you absolutely need to run wine as root, please consult the man/documentation/FAQ/README or whatever. Exitting!
the key point here is not to specify the exact option switch because it's likely that most users will just copy/paste it on the command line and rerun wine as root. At least making them run though the documentation (hopefully) gives them additional education.